`Everything Is Illuminated: A Novel' by Jonathan Safran Foer.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Near the end of Jonathan Safran Foer's enormously smart, fearless, funny and heart-shredding debut novel, a young U.S. tourist in the Ukraine _ by no coincidence also named Jonathan Safran Foer _ reaches into a box of mementos scraped up from the dust of a shtetl that had been bombed into oblivion by the Nazis in 1942.

"Here," he says, groping around and finally pulling out an old book, which he places on the table in front of him.

"I had never previous witnessed a book similar to it," the young man's Ukrainian translator says, dusting off the relic. "The writing was on both covers, and when I unclosed it, I saw that the writing was also on the insides of both covers and, of course, on every page. It was as if there was not sufficient room in the book for the book."

A similar sense of elbowing, straining-at-the-seams fulmination and insufficiency also is evident in "Everything Is Illuminated." From the fidgety, screaming type on its dust jacket and the upside-down author photo on the back flap to its poetic but agitated, even occasionally hyperventilating prose, Foer's book is stuffed full: full of love, loss, memory, fantasy; full of charm and laughter, dreams and madness; full of miraculous birth and history's unspeakable horrors; full of ta-daaah slick lit tricks and coy post-modern playfulness; full _ perhaps mostly _ of itself.

On its surface, the story seems straightforward: Jonathan Safran Foer, aka "the hero," arrives in the Ukraine in 1997 hoping to locate a mysterious gentile woman named Augustine who had saved his grandfather from the Holocaust. Through Heritage Touring, a travel agency "for Jewish people ... who have cravings to leave that ennobled country America and visit humble towns in Poland and Ukraine," Jonathan has fallen into the clutches of a terrifically manic trio: Alex Perchov, the aforementioned translator, who overflows with charming post-communist braggadocio but is barely "fluid" in English idioms; Alex's widowed and supposedly blind grandfather Alexander, who will be the driver, and the grandfather's malodorous female seeing-eye dog, Sammy Davis Junior, Junior. Alex, Alexander and Sammy may not be the guides from hell, but they do a credible impersonation. "I do not cogitate that there was a person in the car that was surprised when we became lost amid the Lvov train station and the superway to Lutsk," Alex reports, but their jaunt with Jonathan, the tourist, is filled with terrific culture-collision set pieces, including one in a hotel restaurant that rivals for hilarity Jack Nicholson's famous hash-house scene from "Five Easy Pieces". And Alex himself is, well, himself:

"In truth, my life has been very ordinary. ... I dig American movies. I dig Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson. I dig to disseminate very much currency at famous nightclubs in Odessa. Lamborghini Countaches are excellent, and so are cappuccinos. Many girls want to be carnal with me in many good arrangements, notwithstanding the Inebriated Kangaroo, the Gorky Tickle, and the Unyielding Zookeeper. If you want to know why so many girls want to be with me, it is because I am a very premium person to be with. I am homely, and also severely funny, and these are winning things."

As the story's elaborately alternating narrative strands stretch, intertwine and eventually tangle, the reader soon grasps that Foer, the tourist, is writing a magical-realism history of Trachimbrod, his long-dead grandfather's native village, and that Alex, the translator, is ...